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Dragna's Blog: The Tragedy of Rudolph van Richten
🕑 Added 2023-12-10 16:04:00 +0000 UTCThe three vampiric brides of Strahd von Zarovich - Ludmilla, Volenta, and Anastrasya - have a far more pronounced role in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded. Where, in RAW, the three brides are ordinary vampire spawn serving as mere guardians of Strahd’s coffin, in Reloaded, they serve roles somewhat closer to Strahd’s lieutenants, acting as mini-bosses who instigate trouble throughout Barovia in order to impress him and earn his favor.
The original Curse of Strahd has two major events that make little sense if performed by Strahd himself: St. Andral’s Feast and the summoning of Wintersplinter. In both cases, the players find themselves faced with a fight that they cannot possibly win. In both cases, Strahd is pursuing a goal of wanton destruction with little tact or nobility.
These fights make a lot more sense, however, if you replace Strahd with one of his brides - Volenta in St. Andral’s Feast and Ludmilla at Yester Hill - and assume that the entire schemes have been orchestrated by the brides in order to catch Strahd’s attention by tormenting his enemies.
It also works on a gameplay and narrative level as well. The players are now faced with a miniboss that they can meaningfully defeat, and who has an excuse to run away and face the players again later as a recurring enemy. It also gives Strahd a kind of plausible deniability (“Oh, that’s just my spawn doing their own thing; I had no involvement myself”), which allows the DM to play up his Gentleman persona before and during the dinner at Ravenloft.
Volenta and Ludmilla, then, are fairly easy to set up. But what about Anastrasya?
To brainstorm, I reviewed how Strahd was influencing the different parts of Barovia. Volenta was attacking Vallaki. Ludmilla was attacking the Winery. Kiril, as the new leader of the werewolf pack, was terrorizing the Svalich Road/Krezk’s walls. The village of Barovia had already been effectively neutralized by the undead siege. What was left for poor Ana to do?
I took another look at Strahd’s campaign goals and realized that, while his agents were actively terrorizing different parts of Barovia, two key goals remained unfulfilled: finding Van Richten and turning Ireena Kolyana. Unwilling to delegate the Ireena quest, I decided that Anastrasya would take the initiative to hunt down and defeat the old vampire hunter, planning to spirit him away to Castle Ravenloft’s dungeons to be tortured at Strahd’s pleasure.
Planning the Crime
Van Richten was in hiding, which meant Anastrasya needed some way of luring him out. In a previous campaign I’d run, I’d had Victor Vallakovich (isolated, hateful, and afraid in the wake of his family’s deaths) begin assassinating members of Lady Wachter’s inner circle as a threat and show of vengeance. I figured a similar murder mystery could work here - Anastrasya would murder Vallakians over the course of multiple nights and, through her connections to Fiona, frame Van Richten for the crime.
Here’s how my first idea shook out:
- Anastrasya, using her second-phase direwolf form, would brutally murder Vallakians out and about after sundown.
- Using her connections to Fiona, Ana would then report (through her swarms of bats) having seen Van Richten commit the murders.
- Fiona would put up Wanted posters for Van Richten.
- The players, upon seeing the posters, would confront Fiona and get the quest to bring the murderer to justice.
- If the players had met Van Richten, they would work with him to clear his name. Otherwise, they would investigate on their own.
- The players would eventually track Ana to her hideout, an abandoned townhouse in Vallaki. There, they’d do battle with her with Van Richten’s assistance. (If they hadn’t previously befriended him, he’d appear midway through the fight to assist them.)
After discussing the idea somewhat with the Patreon Discord, I decided to change it so that Ernst Larnak (Fiona’s spy), not Ana, was the one actually committing the murders. This made things a bit cleaner, bringing in a sense of intrigue and character relationships while also better explaining why the wounds on the corpses would be consistent with human weaponry.
This was all well and good - until someone else on the Discord pointed out that this arc did nothing to address Van Richten’s history - his slaughter of the Radanavich clan, his relationship with Erasmus, and his troubled partnership with Ezmerelda. This arc was, after all, his arc, in a sense, and yet it provided little more than filler content setting up Anastrasya for some later storyline.
That needed to change.
A Bloodstained Past
Dr. Rudolph van Richten has a dark and bloody past. Once an ordinary physician, he lost his family when a band of Vistana kidnapped his son, Erasmus, and sold him to a vampire. According to the burned journal page in Van Richten’s Tower, after locating and killing his son (who had been turned into a vampire), Van Richten tracked down the Vistani and - with the aid of a mysterious lich and its army of undead - slaughtered them all. With her dying words, the leader of the Vistana caravan cursed him, condemning him to always walk beside monsters, and see all he loves die beneath their claws.
But is that really what happened? The backstory of Ezmerelda d’Avenir in the RAW character appendix tells a different story: that Van Richten spared her parents (two members of the Vistani band that kidnapped Erasmus), and this act of mercy inspired her to seek out and train beside Van Richten later in life.
Obviously Ezmerelda wouldn’t have trained beside Van Richten if he murdered a helpless Vistani caravan, let alone her own parents. But how to reconcile these, especially given the fact that Van Richten is, indubitably, cursed?
In the original Reloaded, my anwer was simple: Van Richten spared Ezmerelda’s parents (and one or two members of the rest of the caravan) after interrogating them about Erasmus’s whereabouts. Once he killed Erasmus, he returned to the caravan (which Ezmerelda and her parents had since departed) and killed them all, triggering his curse. Ezmerelda was ignorant of the caravan’s fate (which Van Richten had kept secret from her during their time together), but could learn it during the course of the campaign, triggering a dramatic confrontation.
In Re-Reloaded, I largely kept this approach, but added an additional minor figure: Arturi Radanavich, the last survivor of the Radanavich caravan that kidnapped Erasmus.
According to Van Richten’s Guide to the Vistani, a supplement from old Ravenloft lore, Arturi hid away in his grandmother’s trunk during Van Richten’s attack. Just as Arturi’s grandmother cursed Van Richten, so too did Van Richten unknowingly curse Arturi and his family, commanding: “Undead take you, as you have taken my son!”
Arturi’s curse made him an exile from Vistani society, with undead pursuing him wherever he went. Eventually, years later, he and Van Richten reunited, and the two embarked on a year-long journey together to heal the wounds of mistrust and lift their curses together.
Why add Arturi? A few reasons:
- I wanted a way to explain why Van Richten was no longer racist toward the Vistani, which is provided by his year-long quest with Arturi.
- I wanted a way to foreshadow Van Richten’s backstory, which I implemented via a story Arturi tells at Tser Pool, which in turn helped create a “Game of Stories” the players could participate in.
- I wanted to signal to the PCs, in advance of and during the whole “kidnapping Arabelle” plot in Missing Vistana, that VR was a Good Guy and shouldn’t be antagonized or mistrusted.
This largely worked out well. In addition to the reasons above, it also made Van Richten a much softer and more tragic character, who no longer sought to lift his curse so much as redeem himself for the actions that led to it originally.
Now, one or two people pointed out that it would be more narratively interesting for Van Richten to find some way of lifting his curse through the players’ actions during the campaign. I agreed, but figured things worked just fine this way; not all possible content needs to be Actual Content.
(Remember this - it’ll be important later.)
So I went about integrating Arturi into the narrative - inserting him at Tser Pool and modifying Van Richten’s journal entry to discuss his redemption. By all accounts, this went pretty well; players were intrigued by Arturi and were generally primed to trust Van Richten as soon as they met him.
And then, several months later, I started planning Anastrasya’s arc (which I now called “The Moonlit Murders”) in earnest . . . and promptly hit the wall I described above.
What’s Your Story?
Every good story is, fundamentally, about something.
Dracula is about societal fears, moral boundaries, and the nature of mortality. Frankenstein is about the power of creation, ethical responsibility, and alienation from human society. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is about obsession, hubris, and the lust to conquer new frontiers.
So too in Reloaded (though I wouldn’t claim anywhere near the level of thematic coherence or significance as the three novels above). For example:
- St. Andral’s Feast is about poverty, fear, and the nature of the sacred.
- The Missing Vistana is about mistrust, alienation, and reconciliation.
- Doru’s mini-arc in Welcome to Barovia is about hope, faith, and redemption.
These aspects build upon the core themes of the campaign, further accentuating the thematic resonance of the final confrontation with Strahd. But what about Moonlit Murders? So far, it was just “go hunt down the Bad Lady and stop her from doing Bad Things.”
I wanted a narrative arc that would introduce Anastrasya and develop her as a recurring villain. But I needed a narrative arc that would address real, meaningful themes and character development, thereby increasing the thematic resonance of the campaign as a whole.
Here’s where Van Richten’s tragedy came roaring back: while Missing Vistana introduced the players to his situation, it didn’t really resolve it, or even provide any means to explore it. The dramatic climax of his arc was the confrontation with Ezmerelda (who would, reasonably, be betrayed and dismayed upon learning the truth), but I had no place to actually put it. Moreover, Van Richten never had any meaningful resolution or reconciliation with Erasmus, who just kind of vibed in the Ethereal Plane without interacting with his father (except in optional player-created scenes via Victor’s spirit mirror).
So, I (and some vocal Discord members) figured: Why not put that here? Why not create emotional, thematic stakes and resonance by making this the arc where Van Richten completes his character arc and achieves some kind of self-actualization?
This was a good idea in principle. But it was easier said than done.
My first idea was simple: Van Richten is a hero, but he’s neither stupid nor reckless. As such, Ana needed to provoke him with the one thing that would surely motivate him: Erasmus.
Ghosts most often form from violent deaths. I further reasoned that, at the moment those ghosts first pass into the Ethereal Plane, a hole might form in the veil - if only for a moment: an opening that Anastrasya could use to capture and trap Erasmus’s ghost.
From there, she could offer a trade that would prey upon his guilt: He could trade himself for Erasmus, thereby paying the punishment for his sins, or Erasmus would die again. This message, which she would send to the players as a proxy, would alert Ezmerelda to Van Richten’s “sins” and force a dramatic confrontation to resolve this sudden discrepancy. The climax of the arc could be Van Richten rescuing Erasmus from Ana’s clutches and reuniting with his son for the first time in decades.
But how would Ana learn about Erasmus and Van Richten’s past in the first place? Well, Arturi was still in Barovia, and while (given his Vistani heritage) Ana couldn’t harm him, she could charm him and convince him to surrender his secrets - perhaps even use him as a messenger or additional hostage.
This seemed fine. But then someone rightfully pointed out - the thing that allows Van Richten to see his son needed to be his self-forgiveness: the culmination of his personal arc. The fulfillment of the narrative comes from the fulfillment of the character arc, after all.
This couldn’t come from Ezmerelda; as much as their reconciliation mattered for Drama, she wasn’t one of the victims of his crusade, nor could she really help him forgive himself. It had to come from Van Richten himself.
Notably, for his character development to also resolve the narrative, Van Richten’s self-forgiveness needed to allow the players to win some kind of gameplay challenge they couldn’t already win. This led me to ask: What is qualitatively different, in a gameplay sense, between a Van Richten who’s forgiven himself and a Van Richten who hasn’t? What about self-forgiveness allows Van Richten to (1) help defeat Anastrasya, and (2) reunite with Erasmus?
The first thing that came to mind was a very classic trope: a guilty Van Richten is unwilling to put others at risk for his mistakes, while Van Richten at peace welcomes their help. But that just led to a really bad railroad: Van Richten somehow inevitably gives the players the slip and runs to go fight Ana on his own, then the players find out he vanished and go chase him.
This approach also had another big issue: Why wouldn’t Van Richten believe the players to be capable of defeating Anastrasya? The climax of the arc all but required the players to take her down, so he’d wind up looking pretty silly if his whole argument was “I didn’t want to put you at risk” and then the players demolished Ana without anyone getting KO’d. Plus, abandoning the players implied a fundamental lack of faith in the players’ skills, which some players might take as an insult.
I wasn’t ready to give this idea up yet, though, so I tried reframing the problem and considering it that way. Imagine Van Richten is Batman. The Joker (Anastrasya) has promised to kill Robin (Erasmus) unless Batman unmasks himself and/or comes to a particular place. Assuming the Justice League (the players) is accessible and willing to help, why wouldn’t Batman just ask the Justice League for help?
Blackmail was one option: If Ezmerelda/the players didn’t know about Van Richten’s past crimes against the Vistani, he obviously wouldn’t want that information to come out. Anastrasya might therefore threaten to reveal the truth unless Van Richten came alone.
But then what about Arabelle? (Van Richten is still protecting her, after all, as of the end of The Missing Vistana.) Would Van Richten really abandon her just to save his own legacy? Arguably not.
Next option: Duress. Anastrasya warns him that, unless he comes alone, Erasmus dies immediately upon his arrival. But that didn’t work either - it would remove any sense of self-sacrifice. Van Richten wouldn’t be acting out of guilt; he’d be acting out of desperation.
I took a step back and wiped the board clean again. This time, I started from the basics of a character arc - a Want versus a Need. Van Richten wanted to redeem himself through sacrificing himself for a greater cause. He needed to forgive himself for his past sins and his failure to protect Erasmus. (Steven Universe fans might recall the “Why won’t you let me do this for you, Rose?” scene - it’s a pretty apt comparison here.)
Okay, so - let’s assume Van Richten “betrays” the players by going off to face his fate alone. It can’t come from a place of mistrust or doubt; instead, it must derive from ignorance - a sincere belief that his death is the only way forward.
This meant that the players would need to have a revelation - a discovery that showed that Van Richten didn’t need to go alone at all.
Could it be as simple as “Van Richten thinks Ana has charmed Vallakian spies everywhere, but Arturi reveals to the players that she can only charm one person at a time”? No; that wasn’t quite resonant enough.
I took another step back and tried to figure out what leverage Ana actually had. Van Richten cares about Erasmus, sure. But he also cares about his students - Ezmerelda, specifically. But how to threaten a Wizard 7 / Fighter 7 with lots of shiny magic items? Perhaps instead of threatening Ez’s life, Ana was threatening Ez’s future.
In Re-Reloaded, Ezmerelda is close friends with the Krezkovs, who nursed her back to health several years ago when Ez lost her leg to Kiril. Perhaps Ana was threatening to kill the Krezkovs - say, using a charmed Arrigal to do the deed. Arrigal, after all, is a spy of Strahd’s, and would struggle to explain or justify what he’d done. Enraged by the Krezkovs’ deaths, Ezmerelda would hunt Arrigal down and kill him - and set off a cycle of blood and vengeance with the Vallakian Vistani camp, and especially with Luvash.
Just like Van Richten, Ezmerelda would fall from grace. But unlike Van Richten, the players have a chance to intervene and prevent it from ever happening - by stopping Arrigal from receiving Anastrasya’s message (e.g., a bat sent from Vallaki).
I went to bed feeling pretty happy about this, and then promptly woke up and threw it all away.
Y’know. As you do.
D&D is a Game, Not a Story
Why did I keep running into the same wall over and over again? Why did I keep pondering grand, interesting narratives that inevitably wound up in the trash?
Because I was starting from a plot instead of a dramatic question.
A “dramatic question” is what the players do in a story. “Plot” is all the stuff that happens along the way - all the exposition, twists, character developments, and so on.
In Van Richten’s prior arc, The Missing Vistana, I’d been working from a very clear, simple dramatic question: “Find Arabelle.” This accurately described what the players did in gameplay terms - they explored, investigated, roleplayed, and fought their way to Arabelle’s hidden location.
But in this arc, while I had a dramatic question for the Anastrasya part of the quest (“Find and stop the murderer”), all the Van Richten stuff was all drama, no question. I was trying to craft a dramatic question to fit my plot instead of crafting a plot to fit my dramatic question.
So, I asked myself: What was this arc about? Obviously it was about finding and stopping the murderer. But what else was it about, vis a vis Van Richten himself?
Well, what meaningful goals could the players accomplish with Van Richten? “Get Van Richten to forgive himself” was fun, but could basically be completed in a single social encounter with Ez (or not at all). In a television show, that works fine - the writers can just arbitrarily contrive that the players say exactly the right words to seed some kind of revelation that Van Richten has later on in the climax. But that doesn’t work in a game like D&D.
And then I realized that I’d accidentally handicapped myself way long ago - right at the beginning of writing Re-Reloaded itself.
I’d removed Van Richten’s curse - the biggest, most defining dramatic element of his character.
And then it all became clear.
Van Richten wants to atone for his guilt by saving Arabelle. But he needs to forgive the Vistani for their crimes against him - and be forgiven by the Vistani (vis a vis Arturi) in turn.
Suddenly, I knew what the climax was: a battle not only against Anastrasya, but a manifestation of Van Richten and Arturi’s curses themselves. And Arturi was no longer a friendly NPC, but a pseudo-antagonist who the players would need to convince to forgive Van Richten instead of attacking him.
Now, the dramatic question was: “Can the players lift Van Richten’s curse before it destroys those he loves?”
Now the players had agency. Now I could build a climax in which all of the essential elements - Anastrasya, who wanted to capture Van Richten by leveraging his guilt; Arturi, who was using Anastrasya to get access to Van Richten and to lift his curse; Van Richten, who sought to rescue his loved ones from the curse and wanted to lift his own curse; and Ezmerelda, who needed a chance to learn about Van Richten’s past and to reconcile with him - came together. Now, all the pieces resonated and fit together.
Here’s the (very preliminary) structure I settled on:
- Fiona asks the players to investigate a crime scene. It’s got the dead body of one of her cultists and a bloody message threatening servants of the Devil “signed” by Van Richten. She asks them to investigate and bring Van Richten to justice. The players can find Rictavio’s hat of disguise on the ground nearby.
- If the players visit Arabelle at the Vistani camp, they learn that Van Richten left to visit Vallaki the previous evening and didn’t come back. She tells them that Erasmus can guide them to Van Richten’s current location and drops some cryptic hints about Van Richten’s curse and how to lift it.
- Erasmus guides the players to the church via spooky poltergeist activity. There, the players find an (undisguised) Van Richten laying low. Van Richten tells them he was ambushed by and briefly dueled Anastrasya before realizing he was outmatched and fleeing.
- The players somehow learn from Nikolai and Karl Wachter that Fiona has been hosting a vampire visitor at Wachterhaus. Upon checking in with Fiona, the players can convince her to reveal that Anastrasya has been trying to get her to restore the old “Blood Tax” - a sacrifice of victims to Strahd. Fiona can help the players track Ana to her hideout in Arasek Stockyard.
- Upon arriving at the stockyard, the players and Van Richten are confronted by Arturi, who reveals Van Richten’s crimes and demands his life in penance and to lift the curse. The players, using Arabelle’s advice, must persuade Van Richten to keep his own life and Arturi to accept Van Richten’s forgiveness.
- Once Van Richten and Arturi have forgiven each other, Anastrasya appears, mocks them, and attacks. As the players defend themselves, they’re also forced to fight off a horde of undead conjured by the last throes of Van Richten and Arturi’s curses.
- Should the players drive Anastrasya off and help Van Richten and Arturi survive the curse’s death throes, the curse is broken and Erasmus is able to cross into the Material Plane, greeting his father in person for the first time in nearly two decades.
It’s only a rough skeleton for now, but all of the pieces are there - real dramatic questions that tie the themes, narrative, gameplay, and characters together.
And for now, that’s all I need.
